Troop Allocation and Deployment

What I find most unbelievable is the fact that the Pentagon ignored key military doctrine: when you decide to go to war, apply swift and decisive force, don't start with a small amount of battalions and build from there. Go in and take care of the situation quick using overwhelming man power to establish effective control of an area. The mistake we made in Vietnam was starting with out with a small force in the country and building it up until there were hundreds of thousands of troops fighting an insurgency in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The mistake we made in Iraq was assuming that we could secure the country with only a couple thousand troops, while carpet-bombing the Iraqi government into submission. In terms of doing the latter, we were successful, but long-range missiles cannot secure the situation on the ground; preventing looting and civil disorder requires a large force. Technology has its limitations. You need manpower to secure key targets on the ground once the enemy... Read more

The best troop allocation and deployment for our troops in this mess is the good old USA.

. . .and we still don't care and we let this administration get away with it.

They can't be too bad if they haven't called my ass back yet.

We went to war in Iraq undermanned and we are still undermanned. Donald Rumsfeld deserves most of the blame for this tactical error.

Maybe Rumsfeld knows what he's doing with the current troop levels in Iraq - but most military experts and historians seem to think that the size of Iraq makes a 130K occupying army ill equipped to keep the insurgency subdued. The continued successes of the insurgency would seem to support this position.